By BRONWYN SELL*
ETHIOPIA - At the wide-eyed aged of 2, when Ahmed Ibrahim Hussein was just beginning to explore his world, his throat was slit in a civil war he could not possibly have understood.
His 5-year-old sister, Asha, was shot dead beside him.
Their small skeletons are buried near the northwestern Somali city of Hargeisa, and for 11 years their mother, Amina Ali, has been too scared to visit the graves.
Now peace has come to northwest Somalia and the 50-year-old woman has gained the courage to leave the refugee camp she fled to with her surviving family in 1989, to face the ghosts of home.
"I will be loving when I see my homeland. There is a peace process there. There is a flag," she says through an interpreter as she packs her tukul (hut) and her few possessions.
Amina Ali is one of about 6000 refugees who have chosen to leave Hartisheik Refugee Camp in far east Ethiopia in a fortnight-long United Nations High Commission for Refugees repatriation exercise.
Their trip along dirt roads through the barren savannah of eastern Ethiopia to the dusty Somali border town of Alibelah will be short - only 35 km - but it has taken most 12 years to get there.
The future will be tough. Somalia has just elected its first President in a decade, but it is too early to tell whether he will be able to hold back the rival clans long enough to rebuild the shattered country.
Aden Madar Ali, chairman of the camp's refugee committee, said it was hard for the refugees to leave the camp, where safety, food and water were taken for granted.
"There is nothing in Somalia," he said.
"There is not any work there. There is not any help. I was in Hargeisa and I saw some of the [former] refugees. They had sold their [UNHCR] food ration for rooms.
"When they reach Hargeisa they have not any money, they have not any food, they have nothing."
The deputy representative of the UNHCR Ethiopian branch office, Peter Okoye, acknowledges that the repatriated refugees have a hard time ahead, but says they must play a part in rebuilding their nation.
The refugees' problems do not end when they reach the border, and neither do the UNHCR's responsibilities abate.
About 240,000 refugees from Hartisheik have returned to northwest Somaliland since the early 1990s, when it was the biggest refugee camp in the world.
But a further 11,000 people remain, many from the still volatile southern Somalia, and there are tens of thousands more in camps along the Ethiopian-Somali border.
Drought, meanwhile, is making rural Ethiopians refugees in their own country as they leave their dry lands to find food and water - and this is still the rainy season. Some starving farmers have been begging for food from the refugees.
Northern Kenya is also in a drought, and just as the UNHCR was hoping to close the camps for Kenyan refugees in southern Ethiopia, they are likely to start filling up again.
*Bronwyn Sell volunteered for the UNHCR through its Camp Sadako international youth awareness programme, which began in 1993 and was extended to New Zealanders for the first time this year.
Ethiopian mother going home to ghosts
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